As the pace of daily life increases, individuals are often overwhelmed by the number, variety and frequency of activities to be completed in the course of a day, week or month. Hand written notes, stickers or calendar entries are often used but many of those techniques fail because there is not an automated system to maintain the schedule and such systems do not provide the user meaningful feedback about adherence to the ordered completion of the desired activities.
In one specific area, the scheduled taking of medicines, patients or other medication-users frequently forget to take medication because: 1) the medicine is for an acute problem and the patient is not used to taking medicine on a regular basis; 2) they take regular medication, but frequently forget; 3) they take many medications and are easily confused if the medicines are to be taken at different times. In addition, patients sometimes may take too much medicine because they forgot that they have already taken the medication.
While some electronic activity monitoring systems have been proposed, these system are generally configured to prevent an activity until a permitted time (obstructive) or are engineered with features to provide a user with detailed information about the contents of an associated container such as the name of the medication, the time for a scheduled dose, side effects and other information related to the user or the medication. Even conventional tracking systems that provide more simplistic interfaces, there is not allowance for user specific features in the monitoring system elements. In this way, the conventional systems accommodate the machine readable aspects (i.e., an RFID tag with sufficient memory and accurately storing the appropriate information) but the user is left with the problem of picking the right container at the right time without assistance from the monitoring system except trial and error until the proper container is located.
What is needed is a simple and user friendly activity monitoring system that permits a user some configurability to ensure easy recognition of an object associated with an activity while the machine readable aspects of the system are provided with appropriate machine detectable elements.